As cyber warfare turns 10, the West risks falling behind

   But Moscow in particular is seen as going much further, sometimes delegating attacks to criminals and others outside government. That strategy, Western experts say, allows such individuals and groups to operate with immunity providing they do not attack targets within their own nations – for example, through credit card theft

That's why we're always wary of software coming out of Russia - there's no accountability - those responsible won't get prosecuted there

This reminds us, something really peculiar happened in the internet just last week - a Russian state telecom "stole" ownership of IP addresses that resulted in a lot of financial traffic being re-routed thru its routers when those are not authorized:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/04/russian-controlled-telecom-hijacks-financial-services-internet-traffic/

Russian-controlled telecom hijacks financial services’ Internet traffic -

Visa, MasterCard, and Symantec among dozens affected by "suspicious" BGP mishap.

   On Wednesday, large chunks of network traffic belonging to MasterCard, Visa, and more than two dozen other financial services companies were briefly routed through a Russian government-controlled telecom under unexplained circumstances

>    "I would classify this as quite suspicious," Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at network management firm Dyn, told Ars. "Typically accidental leaks appear more voluminous and indiscriminate. This would appear to be targeted to financial institutions. A typical cause of these errors [is] in some sort of internal traffic engineering, but it would seem strange that someone would limit their traffic engineering to mostly financial networks."

>    Normally, the network traffic bound for MasterCard, Visa, and the other affected companies passes through services providers that the companies hire and authorize. Using BGP routing tables, the authorized providers "announce" their ownership of the large blocks of IP addresses belonging to the client companies. On Wednesday afternoon at around 3:36pm Pacific time, however, Rostelecom suddenly announced its control of the blocks. As a result, traffic flowing into the affected networks started passing through Rostelecom's routers.

>    The hijacking could have allowed individuals in Russia to intercept or manipulate traffic flowing into the affected address space. Such interception or manipulation would be most easily done to data that wasn't encrypted, but even in cases when it was encrypted, traffic might still be decrypted using attacks with names such as Logjam and DROWN

>    Madory said that even if data couldn't be decrypted, attackers could potentially use the diverted traffic to enumerate what parties were initiating connections to MasterCard and the other affected companies. The attacker could then target those parties, which may have weaker defenses.

People's financial data may have already been stolen - yet there's no recourse to go after those hackers

On still another incident, here's how the false "Syria Hoax" propaganda was traced back to a network of bot Russian social media accounts:

https://medium.com/dfrlab/how-the-alt-right-brought-syriahoax-to-america-47745118d1c9

   This latest social media coup comes just months after Russia's attempts to use similar tactics to meddle with the U.S. presidential election, which U.S. officials believe was undertaken by a secretive Russian intelligence operation based in St. Petersberg tasked with manipulating public opinion.

>    According to Ciaran Martin, the head of a newly created national cybersecurity operation at Britain's GCHQ, which provided U.S. officials with the first indication that the Russians had hacked the Democratic Party, activity like this hasn't slowed down since the presidential election in November. It's actually on the rise.

>    "I think we’ve seen a significant increase in Russian aggression in cyberspace over the past two years," Martin said. "We see attacks from state actors on a very frequent basis ... It has not plateaued. It is continuing to increase."